A national group of professors has voted unanimously to sanction the University of Iowa for the way the school hired its new president.

The Iowa City Press-Citizen reports that the century-old American Association of University Professors voted Saturday to sanction UI for "substantial non-compliance with standards of academic government" during the process that led to last year's hiring of former IBM executive Bruce Harreld as president of the university.

In December, the group's investigating committee found that instead of involving faculty fully in the presidential search, the Iowa Board of Regents engineered a search to identify a figure from the business world. Once the regents identified such a person, the report said, "what followed was at best an illusion of an open, honest search."